Fighting 50 Russian T3s and killing Twitch streamers

There’s 40-50 hostile Tech 3’s with support in warp to our position. Our fleet? A dozen sentry neuting Geddons and a mix of Guardians, a few Command Ships and some scattered misc. Total numbers for us? 40.

The wormhole is not ours. The tower we’re attacking is alien to us. The fleet we’re in? It’s full of people we’ve never flown with. Our target callers? ST and myself. What’s at stake? A good fight. The primary aim is to bait out the hostile fleet to judge a response on a secondary fleet for the next day to finish the tower. We’ve done that. Objective achieved.

The next objective is to survive.

But perhaps I start us in a bit late, for much has occurred prior. Let’s step back and take a deep breath.

The day begins well. Mick found a Proteus uncloaked in our C4a static and… shot it. It never shot back. This is followed by a small fleet materializing, so we form a counter fleet. After some scanning and probing, their fleet warps out the safespot we located – meaning we merely nail a Prophecy.

A few minutes later, myself and Mick get an EVE-Mail.

It’s from an NPC character and links to a Twitch TV stream of… the fleet we just tried to kill. It’s a feed of their buzzard from inside our home wormhole. They have all of us watchlisted and handily available on their screen. I test the delay on the stream by logging my alt back in and, lo and behold, their stream has no delay. Awesome.

We put it to the side for now, for something IMPORTANT has arisen. Our public channel is flaring and it’s Elroy Skimms looking for a chat. More specifically, he’s looking for assistance. His alliance is seiging a C2 Russian corp and the locals have batphoned in every Russian within 100 jumps. 40 Tech 3s have been confirmed entering the wormhole. The tower exits reinforced in an hour.

“We don’t plan to win” Elroy says, “we plan to get them to show their full force before we bring in our own allies tomorrows and are looking for volunteers to die with us”. Way to rally the troops, Elroy, but WHEN shall assist you.

Myself, Mick and ST grab our ships and make haste through high-sec to their location. On the way we acquire some extra pilots; House2Twist, Xenos and some mixed RvB pilots heed our call. Whilst 6 of the 10 or so RvB are in frigates, any help beats no help.

The Volunteer fleet assembles in k-space

The alliance we’re assisting is Ocularis Inferno. They have about 20-25 pilots in the wormhole with various Armageddons and Guardians and are awaiting our fleet. A comms mishap means the primary mumble server is out and we swap to Teamspeak with no further issues.

The volunteer fleet is assembled in kspace and the Ocularis fleet in wspace, time to link up. We fleetwarp to the wormhole, jump in, and warp to the staging tower. ST is assigned as primary target caller, with myself as secondary.

The fleet, ready for action.

The enemy have a couple of Logi out repping the tower but not much else. No time for a drink or a nap, it’s time to start. Leaving the safety of the forcefield behind, it’s out into hell we go. “To those about to die, we salute you” is the only comment in teamspeak as we enter warp.

Landing on an Osprey nails us a single kill but the remaining ships are back into their shields with no issues. The Battleships drop sentries and start shooting the tower.

The Russians have arrived. Sentry drones are recalled. Heavies and mediums are deployed in their stead. Capchain is ready. Comms are quiet, for once. The fleet awaits with bated breath.

My overview lights up as a dozen or so targets land 10km off our side, lead by a Loki, We engage the Loki as the overview continues to fill, taking it out quickly.

A clash of fleets. A game of moons.

Enemy logi lands, as does a mass of T3s. Neuts and damps go onto the enemy logi, but jams and ecm drones go onto ours. The fight spirals into chaos as our battleships buckle under the enemy DPS, our 4 Logi thrown into disarray by the jams. Not to be deterred, our dps combines onto a Legion. I train my lasers on two hostile Falcons, but both warp in low structure. A third evades my fire and disrupts our Guardian chain yet again, losing us a couple more battleships. In retaliation, an Ishtar goes down next. Take that.

The battle in full swing, but our Batteship backbone is crumbling

With our Geddons falling fast, our pressure on the hostile Guardians is greatly reduced and enemy repairs are getting hard to counter. ST does a great job swapping targets as he can, but our DPS is too little for the fleet we face. Nevertheless, a Proteus goes down followed by a Hurricane.

Unfortunately, we’re now in a heap of trouble.

Exhibit A: We cannot break the armour ECM tengu. Nor anything else.

Our dying act is to kill another Ishtar before we bail what we can, the fleet’s wrecks scattered across space. I, of course, die among them.

We say thanks to our hosts and the other volunteers and limp back to our home wormhole chain.

Back in the chain, Firefly is trying to kill the Twitch streamer. The guy is still broadcasting. We know he’s in a cloaked buzzard 75km from our wormhle, but all our orbiting doesn’t decloak him. He’s also still active, manually evading us. Surely he’s figured out we’re watching his public stream?

We finally grab a pair of Interceptors and go for him. As we orbit the wormhole and play a game of “hot-cold”, he finally makes a fatal error. He warps to a bookmark called “c4”. There’s only one C4 wormhole, so we follow. We miss the distance, but I land 30km away according to his stream. Finally, he realises his folly and disables his stream.

Not before warping to the Sun at 100km. I land and decloak him easily.

A massive thanks to those in Ocularis Inferno and the other volunteers who joined us. As always, my corpmates did extremely well and a thanks to them for the various kills throughout the night. I am also sad to report the Twitch stream now needs a password to access…

I’m also glad to report our recruitment drive is a success with several new recruits and many more trying to get in. We need a new recruit tower….

Starting with the promise of action then pacing back as you did makes for better reading. You already engaged the reader.
-Eve-kill is down every single morning when I try to catch up with blogs. 😦
-That buzzard has empty mids, surely it can’t be for lack of cpu/powergrid….

40 vs 50, if you had more geddons and less bantams would the fight have gone differently? Or at what number of geddons do you think you would have survived or forced the T3 to retreat (not that relevant, you did win the strategic objective)?
You used heavy/mediums over sentries. Wouldn’t a dozen sentry drones be more effective due to better alpha or didn’t you have the number for that? Or was it the immobility of sentries that limited their usefulness?

Precisely as tgl3 said – even Gardes backed up by a full rack of Omnidirectional Tracking Links have a hard time hitting T3 cruisers at such a short range.

As for beating the T3 gang, I’m not sure if we could have – they had a lot of ECM on field to disrupt not only our logi but also our own ewar (sensor damps) and did a much better job of coordinating their jams than we did on coordinating damps. I’d be willing to bet Geddon/Domi pilots like myself were swapping targets as they were called, having forgotten, in the heat of battle, their task of bringing enemy logi within the killbox.

The only factual error made in this post, by the way, is that the tower we killed with our friends from , and elsewhere is not the same tower that we were shooting when we got dropped on.